Nobody ever discovered ugliness
through photographs. But many, through photographs, have discovered beauty.
Except for those situations in which the camera is used to document, or to mark
social rites, what moves people to take photographs is finding something
beautiful. Nobody exclaims, “Isn’t that ugly! I must take a photograph of it.”
Even if someone did say that, all it would mean is: “I find that ugly thing…
beautiful.” It is common for those who have
glimpsed something beautiful to express regret at not having been able to
photo-graph it. So successful has been the camera’s role in beautifying the
world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the
beautiful. House-proud hosts may well pull out photographs of the place to show
visitors how really splendid it is. We learn to see ourselves photographically:
to regard oneself as attractive is, precisely, to judge that one would look
good in a photograph. Photographs create the beautiful and—over generations of
picture-taking—use it up. Certain glories of nature, for example, have been all
but abandoned to the indefatigable attentions of amateur camera buffs. The
image-surfeited are likely to find sunsets corny; they now look, alas, too much
like photographs. Many people are anxious when they’re
about to be photo-graphed: not because they fear, as primitives do, being violated
but because they fear the camera’s disapproval. People want the idealized
image: a photograph of themselves looking their best. They feel rebuked when
the camera doesn’t return an image of themselves as more attractive than they
really are. But few are lucky enough to be ‘photogenie’—that is, to look better
in photographs (even when not made up or flattered by the lighting) than in
real life. That photographs are often praised for their candor, their honesty,
indicates that most photographs, of course, are not candid. A decade after Fox
Talbot’s negative-positive process had begun replacing the daguerreotype (the
first practicable photographic process) in the mid-1840s, a German photographer
invented the first technique for retouching the negative. His two versions of
the same portrait—one retouched, the other not—astounded crowds at the
Exposition Universelle held in Paris in 1855 (the second world fair, and the
first with a photography exhibit). The news that the camera could lie made
getting photographed much more popular. The consequences of lying have to
be more central for photography than they ever can be for painting, because the
flat, usually rectangular images which are photographs make a claim to be true
that paintings can never make. A fake painting (one whose attribution is false)
falsifies the history of art. A fake photograph (one which has been retouched
or tampered with, or whose caption is false) falsifies reality. The history of
photography could be recapitulated as the struggle between two different
imperatives: beautification, which comes from the fine arts, and truth-telling,
which is measured not only by a notion of value-free truth, a legacy from the
sciences, but by a moralized ideal of truth-telling, adapted from
nineteenth-century literary models and from the (then) new profession of
independent journalism. Like the post-romantic novelist and the reporter, the
photographer was supposed to unmask hypocrisy and combat ignorance. This was a
task which painting was too slow and cumbersome a procedure to take on, no
matter how many nineteenth-century painters shared Millet’s belief that le beau c’est le vrai. Astute observers
noticed that there was something naked about the truth a photograph conveyed,
even when its maker did not mean to pry. In The
House of the Seven Gables (1851) Hawthorne has the young photographer,
Holgrave, remark about the daguerreotype portrait that ‘while we give it credit
only for depicting the merest surface, it actually brings out the secret
character with a truth that no painter would ever venture upon, even could he
detect it.’ Freed from the necessity of having to make narrow choices (as painters did) about what images were worth contemplating, because of the rapidity with which cameras recorded anything, photographers made seeing into a new kind of project: as if seeing itself, pursued with sufficient avidity and single-mindedness, could indeed reconcile the claims of truth and the need to find the world beautiful. Once an object of wonder because of its capacity to render reality faithfully as well as despised at first for its base accuracy, the camera has ended by effecting a tremendous pro-motion of the value of appearances. Appearances as the camera records them. Photographs do not simply render reality--realistically. It is reality which is scrutinized, and evaluated, for its fidelity to photographs. ‘In my view,’ the foremost ideologue of literary realism, Zola, declared in 1901 after fifteen years of amateur picture-taking, ‘you can-not claim to have really seen something until you have photographed it.’ Instead of just recording reality, photo-graphs have become the norm for the way things appear to us, thereby changing the very idea of reality, and of realism. |
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